Progressive Web Apps: Bridging the eCommerce Experience Gap

Reaching customers on their mobile devices isn’t just a suggested practice, but required. In fact, 89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile. To that end, commerce players can reach their customers in a few different ways: responsive web design, native mobile apps, or progressive web apps.

Responsive Design: Table Stakes

Responsive design was the first step toward connecting eCommerce companies with mobile users. Rather than creating different sites for desktop, mobile, and tablet shoppers, developers could build one site that responds and renders itself to be optimized for the device accessing it. However, responsive design has its limitations when it comes to user experience and as a result, many businesses have developed native mobile apps to meet customer needs.

Native Apps: Powerful, but Bulky

Native shopping apps that offer the functionality and ease of shopping on a desktop site are more user-friendly and integrated into mobile devices. But many mobile users are selective in what apps they choose to download and prefer not to fill their devices’ memory with large app files. For that reason, progressive web apps (PWAs) have become increasingly popular among commerce organizations over the past several years.

Progressive Web Apps: The Perfect Combination

Progressive web apps essentially provide a native app experience to users through a mobile website. So, rather than requiring users to download an app, they can enjoy the functionality and experiences of one in a mobile browser. Bridging the gap between native apps and websites by combining the strengths and diminishing the weaknesses of each, progressive web apps are revolutionizing mobile user experience. In fact, these experiences have been proven to improve SEO, improve page performance by 50% on average, and drive 50% higher conversion rates.

However, progressive web apps can be difficult to build from scratch, and many developers don’t know where to begin or how. In an effort to alleviate some of the pain points of progressive web app development, Magento released the latest update of its commerce platform, Magento Commerce 2.3, featuring PWA Studio.

Magento Commerce 2.3’s PWA Studio provides the tools that developers need to create the progressive web app experience for their customers. Its intuitive user experience enables developers to build progressive web apps at a low cost and a decreased time to market.

Additional features such as the Multi-Source Inventory function were also added in the most recent update of the Magento Commerce platform. You can learn more about PWAs and the additional capabilities included in Magento Commerce 2.3 in Magento’srecent blog post.

With new and exciting features like these, we’re looking forward to seeing the capabilities of Magento 2.3 in action and the benefits and support they can provide for our clients and their customers.

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Perficient Digital

We architect systems of customer delight. We move at the speed of culture. We exist to delight our clients, by relentlessly delighting their customers. We are what happens when more than 200 of the most talented digital strategists, design pros, brand shapers, digital marketers, data scientists, and creative coders all believe one thing to be true – exceptional customer experiences always translate to positive ROI for our clients.